The Jayhawks Mine Youth, Nostalgia, and New Places on New LP 'Sanctuary Park'

Never mind Americana, here’s Canadiana.

Back in the late 1980s when the rootsy Toronto group Blue Rodeo arrived on the scene, Rolling Stone issued a provocative declaration: “The best new American band may very well be Canadian.” Just south of the border back then, a fledgling Minneapolis band called The Jayhawks were taking early steps toward becoming a prime mover in what became known as Americana music.

But band leader Gary Louris now lives in Canada, after marrying a Canadian woman a few years ago. And when the band reconvened to make a new album for the first time in six years, all signs pointed to the Great White North. So now the script is flipped: The best new Canadian band may well be American.

For starters, they’d decided to reconnect with Bob Ezrin, the legendary Toronto producer (Pink Floyd, Lou Reed, Peter Gabriel, Alice Cooper) they first worked with on the Jayhawks’ 2000 album Smile. Much was made at the time about the unusual choice of a producer with extensive arena-rock credentials. Louris, Ezrin, and Jayhawks bassist Marc Perlman spoke at length about Smile in a May-June 2000 No Depression cover story (now available in the ND archives) written by Erik Flannigan, who observed that, despite the unusual pairing, “the album Ezrin and the band ended up making is a classic Jayhawks record.” (Flannigan, by the way, manages The National these days.)

Like Louris, Ezrin recently relocated to Canada, although he was moving back home to his native Toronto. “In the last few years, it seems as if America is split in half,” Ezrin told the Toronto Globe and Mail in February 2025 just after he moved away from Nashville. “Conspiracy theories abound, people are armed to the teeth, and it’s just a different place than the place I went to.” As part of the move, Ezrin officially renounced his US citizenship.

Louris’s move to Canada — he and his wife Stephanie live near Montreal, but are moving to the Toronto area — was primarily about love rather than politics. But he shares Ezrin’s sentiments about the dark turn the United States has taken since Trump’s re-election. That’s clear enough from “American Midnight,” one of the new album’s most intriguing tracks. “It’s like watching a funeral for a friend / Some see a beginning, I only see the end,” he sings.

“I'm mostly commenting on the fact that I'm sad about how splintered the country is,” Louris says of the song, “and how the media feeds each side. People listen to what they want to hear, and nobody listens to each other. It's more about that than directly saying I hate this person or this government or whatever.” That said, he adds, tellingly: “I’m not a ‘USA, USA’ guy. I never have been.” And later: “It’s more like watching from a distance through a more objective filter.”